


Of Apples and Fate (and Penguins)

by aesterismo



Category: Mawaru Penguindrum
Genre: F/M, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-12-19
Updated: 2012-12-19
Packaged: 2017-11-21 15:10:28
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 590
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/599180
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/aesterismo/pseuds/aesterismo
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Three little sheep, three little penguins - there isn’t much of a difference to Shouma because they’re all animals.  But at least the penguins are doing something to validate their existence.  He hopes, anyway.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Of Apples and Fate (and Penguins)

 

What’s more ridiculous than the penguins (other than the fact that they’re the only ones that can see them) is that Shouma was getting a little too used to having them around.

Sure, it freaked him out at first.  They hardly looked like the kind you find at the aquarium and they were curious little buggers, so keeping an eye on them proved less than an easy task.

At first.

Now that Shouma was used to them, the penguins were like part of the furniture.  Or perhaps not even fixtures in their not-so-ordinary lives, but more like - dare he think it - _companions_.

A part of their lives they couldn’t turn away from, a part of them.

Takakura was an interesting family name in and of itself.  They were set on a high pedestal of expectation, as the first character indicated (Kanba, Shouma imagines while dozing off in class one day, would be an emperor penguin, standing tall and proud and protective of those closest to him), but they were also quite lowly and commonplace, like a warehouse or a cellar underground (he presses his forehead to the wooden surface of his desk and shuts his eyes, blocking out the whirring machinery and the silver then red flash of young lives split apart like paper planes, never given a chance to fly let alone live) as well.  He wonders which God out there thought it would be fun to give them penguins of all things, as the animals had close to nothing to do with who they were.

Except they did.  Especially now that they were growing more and more aware by the day of the inevitable fate they’ve been running from.

Himari had ran with them, too.  Ran away and followed them wherever they would go - because she cared, with that pure heart of hers, more than the depths of lilac eyes (such a royal color, Shouma muses over coffee at the corner café on his way back home; she would be a fiorland penguin, timid yet steadfast, a queen in the making) could ever convey.  Much as Shouma wanted to believe they almost made it, circumstance was proving harder and harder to ignore.  The penguins were growing restless again and so were their hearts.

Fate was catching up to them in all the worst of ways.

So they would have to keep running.  They would have to keep running, slipping and sliding along thin ice and praying that somehow, someway, they could outrun the tricks of destiny long enough to buy more time.

It was always about time, wasn’t it?  If humans aren’t waiting for something, anticipating something, _expecting_ something, then it’s like they have no reason to live.

His penguin - his shadow, his other self, the carefree creature he only wished he could be - never could look Ringo in the eye.

Then again, in Shouma’s case, it was hard enough to look away from someone like Ringo.  She was always on the run for something, from something, as if the chase was what kept her alive.

Maybe it wasn’t the chase at all, Shouma realized, letting their fingers lace together in the still winter air, but the knowledge that nothing held so sacred would ever stay in the first place.

Like a rare breed of penguins, Shouma mused, on the verge of extinction due to overpopulation and fate.  They had a friend in circumstance, certainly, but the fault was never all fate’s, either.

(It was their sin, their burden to bear - and little could change what was preordained.)


End file.
